Malice towards none? A work in progress

To the Editor:

Abraham Lincoln has two quotes I would like to center on: In his first inaugural address he talked about acting in ways that reflected “The better angels of our nature.” In his second inaugural he wanted citizens to act with “Malice toward none and charity to all.” I am disturbed and a little frightened by what’s happening in our country right now. Our president and his loyalists are acting in ways that have no resemblance to those ideals. His governing style is instead centering on fear, hate and greed. He wants you to fear immigrants. Yes there are many who have entered the country illegally, and there needs to be ways to keep them from overwhelming the system. But their crime rate is much lower than the general population, they are not eating the dogs and the cats. They should be afforded due process, not just snatched off the street and either detained or deported without a hearing. He wants you to hate those who disagree with him as much as he does, especially those who have called him out for anything he has done wrong. Not everything is a witch hunt! That brings me to greed. Please Google Trump University and The Trump Foundation. He scammed students and took money from his charity. Wikipedia is not fake news. Loyalty plays into all of this, but that’s a whole other story. Finally, there’s MAGA.

When has America ever been so great that there was not room for improvement? Take voting. We have gone from white male landowners to white males to all males to males and females 21 and older to lowering the voting age to 18. Present day problems revolve around gerrymandering, redistricting maps, voting rights, fair elections. We are a work in progress. MAGA to me means back to the good old days, whatever that means. Our president, by his words and actions, has very little use for the terms climate change, woke and DEI. Admittedly there are things to be worked out. Denying climate change and doing nothing to try to get a handle on it will do nothing more than increase suffering for future generations. We need to be at least a little “Woke” about our past mistakes regarding the way we mistreated people because of their race, creed or sexual orientation. There are Holocaust museums for a reason. We can work on DEI to insure that neither discrimination or reverse discrimination is occurring, keeping in mind that the opposite of DEI is segregation, inequality, and exclusion, things that we as a nation have practiced in the past. Do we really want to go backwards? It’s a little ironic that a month and ten days after he asked for “Malice toward none and charity for all,” on April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated. 

Frank Siedschlag

Sugar Camp